Popsicle seller

What has been your dominant philosophical concern throughout your photographic career?
Well, you see now you're asking me to verbalise and I can't. I think the photographs have to say that. Externally speaking, I've always been extovertal. In other words if I do something, I want it to work. So, from a philosophic point of view, I have a feeling that photography is a visual language. I want to communicate, but I want to help other people to communicate with themselves and with others.
Dr Land is one of the greatest humanists I have ever known and he has a belief in photography that is perfectly extraordinary. He has proved it possible, by his process (Polaroid), for the ordinary person to say something about the world in a visual sense. Now he doesn't claim: "Now you're all artists you're all creative", because he knows perfectly well that art is a pretty profound thing. The average business man, lawyer, or salesman has a wallet and in that wallet he's got a picture of his family. It can be pretty horrible photographically but it's of that man's family. You wouldn't tell him to tear up that photograph because it isn't a good image. You couldn't do it. The human experience is the significance of that image. Now it's not a picture you would put up on the wall.
Ansel Adams

Dialogue with Photography, Paul Hill & Thomas Cooper